Judy

“He read what he could find—the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“There’s a biblical saying that translates roughly as “First you will do, then you will understand.” Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Els puts his eye to a burst of stars. They cluster, a blue star nursery, spraying out new worlds. He feels like he did two years ago, when he first looked at a glowing stain of cells under the 1,000x objective and realized that life happens elsewhere, on scales that have nothing to do with him.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“If you ask them directly, they'll reply, very puzzled, "Yes, what you say sounds like Truth. But the world is full of Truths. So what if you have a Truth?”
― Hao Jingfang, Invisible Planets